Christian Williams is a PhD student in renaissance/early modern literature whose primary research interests include studies in the intersections of law and literature in early modern England and more recently the Bible as literature.

In 2012, Christian earned his Associate of Arts Sciences degree from Columbus State Community College. In 2015, he received his Bachelor of Arts in English degree from Ohio State University. In 2017, he received his master’s degree in English Literature from Miami University in Oxford Ohio.

His past research interests pertain mainly to early modern marriage law, practice and culture around the turn of the seventeenth century. Christian focuses on the ways in which the early modern marriage contract impacted the autonomy married women and fiancées held over their own persons and property and the ways such autonomy subverted common law practices. His research shows that because of other governing bodies such as the Ecclesiastical courts and the Court of Chancery, early modern married women were experiencing more autonomy over person and property than is often associated with early modern England. Discussing marriage autonomy within the context of the early modern legal culture, his work further explores how early modern writers qualify the legal strides that were being made to remedy married women’s legal disability caused by the “legal fiction” of coverture.

While he was earning his master's degree at Miami University, Williams taught first-year English Composition courses as well as advanced writing courses centered on a sports theme. And after receiving his MA, Christian continued to teach his sports-themed advanced writing courses at Miami for another two years before returning to OSU to pursue his PhD in English literature.

Selected publications

• Williams, Christian. Women's Marital Property in Shakespear's All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure. 2017. Miami University, dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center.

Curriculum Vitae